Thorsten Ball
@thorstenball
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Author of and . Working @zeddotdev . Ex- @sourcegraph . Programming where the rubber hits the road.
Großwallstdt, Bavaria, Germany
Joined November 2011
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Pinned Tweet
My second book "Writing A Compiler In Go" is now available!
You can buy it here as a single eBook or in a bundle with its predecessor
"Writing An Interpreter In Go":
#golang
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Man, using the internet on my phone has become unbearable.
l feel anxious when I know I have to google something and then visit 3-4 pages:
cookie banners that fill the whole screen and show up after 1-2s delay, newsletter popups, back-button rarely works, re-renders, …
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This is going to sound very anti-intellectual, but has anyone in the history of documentation ever said "fuck yes, thanks for that diagram, I prefer that over just 30 lines of examples"?
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Aww man what a thing to say
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Few weeks ago, while adding buffer restoration to Zed, I came across this comment.
I've been thinking about it every day and every day the same thought pops into my head.
Why... why don't you save the file?
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I'm fascinated by Chrome's decision to surface tab memory usage like this in the UI.
Is it an attempt to get users to understand that it's not Chrome using memory, but individual pages?
It's quite the odd choice to surface such a, uhm, mechanical detail to every user, no?
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Google Docs now has variables? Wow
Does someone have an explanation for what happened with Google Docs?
For years and years it seemed stagnant and since, what, last year, there's all these new, very nice features popping up on a regular basis.
I need the inside story here.
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I wrote about that 1s-to-4ms optimization we did in Zed again.
I just can't shake those 4ms out of my head.
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Have to say, this amount of 🔥 kinda caught me off guard when I opened page 299.
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One of the highest highs in programming: replacing a 3rd-party dependency with 20 lines of dumb, boring code.
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The book is 8 years old and I still get emails like this. Man....
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This was a very cool morning.
Comment-driven development. Someone on HN said that Sublime's find-all-matches is fast and Zed's is slow.
@as__cii
and I then spent 2hrs & optimized the code.
Got it down from 1.07s to 4ms.
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Looking forward to giving 20min explanations to my non-tech friends about the shirt I'm wearing
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4.5yrs of working with Americans and still forget that “how are you?” isn’t an invitation to lean back and start with “ah, well, you know, so yesterday”
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You keep asking us: Linux when?
Here's our first answer.
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In order to finally get into the habit of reading technical papers, I've set myself the goal to read 50 of them in 2020.
I'm at 14/50 right now and I feel like a kid in a candy store that it didn't realize existed.
What are your favorite papers?
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Book I'd pay $100 for:
The Technical, Oral History of WhatsApp, 2009-2014.
Going from zero to ~50 employees, a distributed system with Erlang that serves 500 million users, and a $20 billion acquisition.
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Not even halfway through, but I paused to tell you: this video by
@awesomekling
in which he builds a JIT compiler is a gold mine.
From explanations, to the code, to how he uses his tools, to how fast he uses his tools, …
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Thanks
@danieldides
for changing my life.
Tools -> Preferences -> Automatically detect Markdown
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Some personal news: this is my last week at Sourcegraph.
• 4.5yrs
• 1604 PRs
• 4 teams
• joined at ~20 people & saw us grow to ~300
• meetups in SF, San Diego, Berlin, Mexico, Amsterdam, Munich, ...
• reported to EMs, Heads of Eng, CEO
Now it's time for something new 🙂
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It's the Year of Zed on Linux on the Desktop!
Linux when? Linux now. 🎉🐧
For the last 6 months, our team and our open source community have been working hard to bring Zed to Linux.
As of today, we've released our first, official, stable build of Zed on Linux!
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Cookie banners, I'm telling you, that's the hill I'm willing to die on.
It's one of the dumbest, ridiculous, most annoying technological developments of my life.
Never would I have suspected that we could come this far. "Well, someone reasonable will surely" -- nope, here we
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As of a few minutes ago: Zed is open source! 🥳
Zed is now open source!
Our mission is to revolutionize developer collaboration, building the world's best code editor in the process. After working together in Zed as a small team, it's time to scale up to transform Zed into a collaboration platform.
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I published 7 years ago and I got this email yesterday.
Made my day :)
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This book will turn 8 this year. 8!
And it still seems to bring people joy :)
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I wrote a blog post about the past 10 years.
What I learned, what I unlearned, what I changed my mind on, what I value and what I now ignore - after 10 years of working as a programmer.
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dude
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If you tried Zed before but then stopped using it, what made you stop?
Hit me with everything you got.
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I *knew* that there's an overlap between unsaved-files-hoarders and tab-hoarders, I *knew* it
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While reading I started to think: which books have influenced me the most as a programmer? Then: wait, it’s not just books, it’s also screencasts and blogs!
This is what I came up with so far.
It’s not even close. So many blog posts, comments, tweets, podcasts, talks, …
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(Friends, to be clear: I'm not making fun of anyone! I'm just wondering: why not save the file *once* in 9 years?)
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Wrote about the mistake of thinking "just doing good work" is enough.
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One of the most unteachable, you-have-to-experience-it-yourself lessons:
You can just delete your backlog or your TODO list and nothing bad will happen. You won't forget the important things. They will resurface.
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I finally wrote about Instruments, one of the most impressive profiling tools I used.
Read it here:
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Get into font rendering and this will be your Sistine Chapel
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For the record: I like it. I like the hum of the machine & having indicators whether it's working well or whether there's noise coming from the engine.
I'd also think little LEDs on each tab that blink when a network request is sent would be nice.
Love this way of thinking about the cues older computer (hardware) gave us. What synthetic cues could we create today to help build intuition about what a computer is doing? (E.g. a grinding noise from context switching, like an electron app brutalizing your laptop battery.)
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Wrote about the complicated feelings I developed for testing recently.
This has the word confession in it.
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Just figured out that btop allows you to click on a process and see its details.
It already was the coolest application. Now it's untouchable.
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@oldmanuk
And since it's coming from
@Tailscale
you know that it's not a false flex, this is a real scar
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The sequel to my book "Writing An Interpreter In Go" will be released this summer.
It's called "Writing A Compiler In Go" and nearly done.
As of today, you can find out more about it here and sign up to get notified when it's available:
#golang
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I was preparing for our huge livestream at work tomorrow, playing around with lights and microphone.
And I might have accidentally created a "Vim tips from the professional for the professional" masterclass video series?
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Being fast is underrated, I'm telling you.
People make all kinds of excuses for why they aren't fast and don't *need* to be and then they look at people that ship huge projects in a year and go "how?"
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Yesterday I wrote a parser for `git blame --incremental`.
Took 22ms to parse 16k lines. Seems slow? Couldn't wrap my head around it. Even the near-noop version took 18ms.
In bed it hit me: didn't use --release! Woke up, ran to computer, tried in release mode:
2ms. Fuck yes.
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Imagine if every team had someone who says "hmm, no, I think we can get this done today" on a regular basis.
The effect is incredible.
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Just merged inline-git-blame into main.
Also used the occasion to improve the tooltips a lot: they're now syntax-highlighted, scrollable, clickable.
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I'm often watching concert videos on YouTube. Last week I noticed that, in Firefox, this routinely uses ~90% CPU.
So I did something I haven't done for 10 years: download video, watch in VLC.
~8% CPU.
Heretic thought: was moving everything to the browser a mistake?
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Woke up and decided to add support for Go.
Ever wanted to execute code from within Zed?
That's now possible!
With Tasks you can run tests, compilers, linters, shell scripts, single functions — anything, really! — all from within Zed.
Read the new Zed Decoded post to get the most out of Tasks:
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My experience with Passkeys so far:
1. Showed up one day
2. No clue what they are, had to read up
3. Sometimes I seem to use them, sometimes I don't, depending on popup
4. Sometimes I used 1password, sometimes apple, sometimes Chrome?
5. I have zero clue which passkeys are where
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me every time someone complains about tech debt in a meeting
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me, years ago: a string? you want a string? sure, why not. fuck it, have two. it's a twofer. i got strings coming out my ears.
me, now: a string? a whole string? on the heap? who are you? isn't a reference enough? what do you even want with a string?
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So is the myth that every pixel you see on Amazon has been optimized and A/B tested for thousands of lifetimes before you laid your eyes on it — is that actually true?
Because, man, I have a hard time accepting that *this* is the best way to present the add-to-wishlist button.
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Wrote about my multi-week investigation into why I suddenly couldn't use ctrl-c anymore.
Yes, it's longer than usual. But hey: Rust, syscalls, shells, Unix processes — all in there.
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Just merged my PR to restore unsaved buffers on restart in Zed 🥳
No more "You have unsaved changes" when quitting Zed.
It'll be in the Preview release next week. Next step: restore project-less windows on restart.
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Setting up a Windows VM and while I'm happy this works I also can't believe it does.
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Think I might've just unlocked a new level of Rust understanding.
Moved ~180 lines of code around, changing how I render blame annotations, moving everything from paint to layout. Fixed all type errors, reorganized code, etc. etc.
Ran it and it worked on first try.
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Look at these beauties!
The paper-folding monkey is such an insightful idea. I wish I would've come up with that.
(Chinese translations of books will be published this year)
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Last week I sat down again with Zed's three co-founders and asked them a lot of questions:
Why Rust? What problems did you run into with Atom? Why own the full tech stack?
Video and transcript are live now.
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I think it‘s 50% of my ChatGPT use: ask it simple questions I know it can answer („translate X“, „when was …“, …) because I dread using the web
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Again and again I come to the same conclusion: if you want to get better at X, you have to do X a lot.
No shortcut, no trick, no cheat. Sure, you can optimize how you do X, and yes, what exactly falls under "doing X" varies, but you still have to put the work in.
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Sometimes I remember that "Scaled Agile For Enterprises (SAFe)" exists and I google the diagram and then I just marvel that this exists and that people look at this diagram and think "yup let's do it" and then they spend years (!) trying to implement it.
And then I stop myself.
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The Go compiler allows you to dump the internal representation of a function by compiling with
GOSSAFUNC=myFunctionName go build
The word "dump" doesn't do it justice.
It's so good. I'm so jealous. I want this in my compiler.
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Not my usual thing on here, but I‘ve been working towards this for 6 years now:
✅ 200kg (440lbs) Deadlift
It‘s not a lot for 23 year old powerlifters, but for someone who hasn‘t done a single workout for 29 years of his life: pretty pumped about it.
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Every time I’m at the dentist I’m fascinated by the software they use (there’s a screen next to the chair).
Today I asked her about it.
Found screenshots online. Look at that.
Straight from a parallel world where no UI paradigm we know exists.
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Reminder: Barrier is free and open source and…
… indistinguishable from magic.
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"Yeah, but the privacy!" - YES, sure, the privacy, the data, whatever, yes, I'm all for it.
Because here's the thing: I can support what the banners/GDPR were trying to achieve AND at the same time think that the banners are the greatest capital-B Bullshit I've ever experienced.
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Just found out that Unicode includes cute stick figures.
Time to rewrite all progress bars and spinners
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Here. Trying to find a recipe and clicking on links.
Yes, I HAVE all the blockers and cookie extensions and all of that. But it only kicks in after 3 seconds.
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Up to 10x faster!
I *had* to record a demo of the project search improvements we landed.
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3 hours to code today. Sat down ready to finish a PR. Got *absolutely nowhere* due to a bug I can‘t figure out.
Lesson learned: none.
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I'm been reading the Async Rust book () and enjoying the sections about building an executor, timer future, etc.
Any other great resources to deep-dive into async Rust and understand it from bottom up?
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Friends, I gotta say,
@ThePrimeagen
really made me blush.
Thanks for the video, man. And thanks for the funny comments, chat!
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Man, you can get a lot done if you just sit down for 3 hours and don't let yourself get distracted. Mind-blowing, actually.
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New edition! "Writing A Compiler In Go" is now available as a paperback!
Get it here (where you can also buy the eBook):
See more pretty pictures here:
#golang
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Here it is: a new Zed Decoded post.
It's about the two data structures at the heart of Zed: the Rope & the SumTree.
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C++ people pronounce "std" as "stood"?!
@murage_kibicho
@thorstenball
Stood-i-o all the way. Or stid-i-o. Just like stood string and stood vector in C++
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I wrote about my last week at Sourcegraph. A collection of ancedotes.
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